West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (18 page)

Pandemonium was both the hardest thing to get used to and the only constant that I could rely on to define a day as ‘average’.

Mae would arrive, propelling a client before her. As she passed, she would break off chatting to him to say, ‘Hello, love, make us a cup of tea, will you?’ And with that, battle commenced. I continued to begin work an hour earlier than Mae in the mistaken belief that if I got everything under control before she arrived, I could deal coolly and efficiently with whatever ensued. The reality was that within half an hour of that first cup of tea, the day would rapidly scuttle into tragedy or farce. Like a boulder crashing down a mountainside, Mae had a momentum that left havoc in its wake.

To arrive with one customer was, perhaps, understandable, but it was not unknown for her to kick-start the day with as many as five men at once. On one such occasion, these were visitors to London who, with a little persuasion from Mae, had decided to all have a go. Handling these groups was a speciality of hers, and she managed to round them all up with the added encumbrances of the two dogs and – as was quite usual – a large bunch of flowers. With a grin and a wink, she passed the dogs’ leads over to me, piled the flowers into my arms and, leaving brief instructions to give the waiting men tea, feed the dogs and put the flowers in water, swept into the bedroom with the first of the friends.

With the dogs yapping round my feet, the flowers in my face and the remaining men standing self-consciously on the landing, I was helpless for a few moments. I deftly shut the dogs and flowers in the kitchen before ushering the men into the waiting room. I had enough experience to stand in the doorway in the pretence of chatting to them. Our division of labour was clear enough: Mae had caught them and I must prevent their escape: so early, so sober, they might easily have changed their minds. It was all rather tricky, because I also had to be ready outside her door when her hand came through with the money. I could do this and be back, blocking the waiting room door, before anyone realised I’d moved.

Another client wended his way up the stairs. On being shown into the waiting room, he bucked like a frightened horse at the sight of so many other faces. I decided to put him in the kitchen with the dogs and the flowers; if he liked dogs he would be kept amused, and if he didn’t, he’d be too scared to move.

At first, performing as cloakroom attendant, gracious host, prison wardress, dog minder and tea lady nearly drove me demented. As time went by, I realised that ‘give everyone tea’ needn’t be taken literally, and if I cocked a deaf ear – as the local parlance had it – life became less difficult.

Once the first influx was dispensed with – always remarkably quickly – I could draw a breath, untangle the dogs and put the flowers (or whatever else Mae had lighted on that day) in a vase. Then Mae would fish for other men and I would be presented with her unpredictable catches.

One afternoon, some months after I had started, business was a bit too quiet for Mae’s liking and she declared she would be out longer than usual. When she returned, she galloped up the stairs calling triumphantly, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’

I went to the landing and found her brandishing a square foot of striped mirror.

‘I’ve been trying to get this for ages. Look, you can see through it.’

She held it up to the light, and what had appeared to be dark stripes showed as plain glass.

‘What I want now is a hole in this wall about here.’ She thumped a spot on the kitchen wall that divided it from her bedroom. ‘Do you think you can do that for me, love?’

Some of the other flats had spyholes so the maid could check on the girl; the mirror was evidently a refinement so the client wouldn’t know he was being watched. I tapped the wall for myself and it sounded hollow.

‘You’re in luck – or rather
I
am. What do you suddenly want this for? Are you going to start lumbering back with villains and desperadoes so I’ve got to keep a constant eye on you?’

‘Not at all, lovey! This is for the geezers to look through. A pal of mine’s got one and she makes a bomb out of it. But apart from that,’ and her voice became more serious, ‘it
is
a bit safer for me if you’ve got a way of seeing I’m all right. After all, you heard about Millicent last week, didn’t you?’

I’d never heard of Millicent before, but I looked as though I understood.

‘It sounds a good idea,’ I said. ‘But you do realise the hole will have to be covered so the kitchen light doesn’t shine through all the time. In fact, the light will have to be switched out when anyone’s peeping at you.’

I still hadn’t bought many tools but I’d kept the miscellaneous selection I’d inherited. I said I would do it the following day when I could buy something more appropriate for the job. Her face fell with disappointment.

‘I so wanted to see it done tonight,’ she said in that crestfallen way she always used to such advantage.

‘But I need a drill,’ I protested.

‘You’ll think of something,’ she said. ‘I’m off.’

And with that, she was gone. To show willing, I could at least mark the place where the hole should be made. I chose a spot on the kitchen wall at
my
eye level – to hell with the clients; they came in all shapes and sizes anyway.

After her next client, Mae asked if I’d thought of something yet. I told her I’d chosen the place for it and she examined my pencil mark studiously.

‘It doesn’t have to be a round hole, you know. Bollocks to that when you’re in a hurry! Where’s your tools, love?’

I showed her the motley bag of odds and ends and she picked out the bent screwdriver and placed the point against the mark. ‘Sure it’s the right place?’

I nodded, and she walloped the palm of her other hand against the butt of the screwdriver, and lo, we had a hole (although the plaster on the other side of the hollow wall was still intact). She was about to repeat the performance but I stopped her.

‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘You said this was the right place.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but the other hole has got to be more precise, so you’re looking downwards at the bed, otherwise we’ll only see the curtains opposite.’

She handed me the screwdriver and said, ‘Well, work out where that’s got to be and we’ll have another bash next time I’m up.’ She disappeared down the stairs, chattering merrily to herself: ‘It’s all bash, bash, bash! Out on the bash, in on the bash – bash, bash, bash . . . !’

Calculating the correct angle was quite a problem, and it was two clients later before I’d found the spot for the other hole. I decided to make it myself, so I went round to the bedroom and began the attempt using Mae’s method. I only succeeded in hurting my hand, so I brought the half-a-hammer into use. I placed a handkerchief in the centre of the bed to represent the centre of interest for the viewer, and on testing it from the kitchen side, found my calculations had been perfectly accurate. The opening still needed to be widened, but success was within reach. Mae came into the kitchen after the next client had gone to find me quietly jubilant.

‘I’ve done the other hole,’ I announced triumphantly, ‘but all I can see through it is my handkerchief.’

‘Was that
your
handkerchief on the bed?’ she asked. ‘My last one wiped his you-know-what on it.’

She had a look through the hole but at first saw nothing at all because I’d temporarily plugged the other side with a twist of newspaper. I rushed in and removed it.

‘We’ve got to have a bit more of the bedroom wall out,’ she called. ‘Get bashing!’

I soon got the hang of the bashing, hitting the screwdriver over a tiny area to flake away the plaster, and then knocking bits off the comparatively soft plasterboard into the recess. The chips of hard plaster were flying everywhere, so I asked Mae if she would help me pull the dressing table over the messiest part of the floor to hide the worst of it. First, she wanted to lie on the bed and get a report on how much of her could be seen at that stage.

‘If you shove up a bit, I’ll be able to see your hips,’ I called out.

She wriggled herself accommodatingly but the wrong way.

‘So they’ll get a good view of me, will they?’

We got the dressing table into position and cleared up the existing mess. Mae departed and I got cracking on the wall again. The frequent interruptions were annoying, as they meant humping the end of the dressing table back into place each time. Though it successfully screened the actual area of demolition, it didn’t hide much mess, because stupid little white chips kept ricocheting all over the place. Eventually I smoothed off the jagged edges with the bread knife and disguised the kitchen side of the hole with a teacloth before taking a break.

‘Have you done it, then?’ Mae asked excitedly next time we were alone. ‘Let’s have a look.’

We went out to the kitchen; I removed the cloth and she peered through.

‘Ah, that’s better! Fabulous! You can see the lot now. Well done, old girl.’ She was beaming happily. ‘Let’s go in and see what it looks like from the other side.’

We went in, but I’d forgotten to replace the cloth and a circle of light burst through, looking like the midday sun. I rushed back to hang the tea towel on its nail. Mae decided we should use a picture instead; she knew just where to get one, but the shop was shut. Next time back, she wanted to know why the mirror wasn’t up on the wall.

‘What do I stick it up there with?’ I asked wearily. ‘Lipstick?’

She just waved her hand airily. ‘I’ll get some glue.’

I called out down the stairs at her retreating figure: ‘It’ll have to be quick-setting stuff.’

She waved acknowledgement. On her way past the kitchen with the very next client, she handed me half a tube of glue.

When the client had gone I said, ‘You’ll have to stop bringing them up until I’ve fixed this in place; otherwise it’ll fall off and frighten the life out of them.’

While the kettle boiled, I fixed the mirror to the wall. We took it in turns to hold it as we drank our tea, then cautiously took our hands away to see if the glue had held.

It had, and with it, one of the main pillars of the Rabbits Regime had crumbled silently into dust. The spyhole meant we could now cater for voyeurs. Mae was delighted; according to her, Rabbits had gradually discouraged all her kinky clients, whose appetites were many and various.

‘She used to take the piss, so in the end they stopped coming. I like kinks about the place. They liven things up a bit . . . Think I’ll try and get ’em back.’

Slowly, but in ever-increasing numbers, like sheep to the fold, her kinky clientele began returning.

Mae planned their reintroduction with some consideration for what remained of my naïvety. It would not have suited her plans if I had jibbed – and I almost certainly would have done – had she brought the more extreme ones back too early in the campaign. My compliance was needed, not just for administrative purposes, but also because many of them required an audience, and thus I was promoted from backstage to chorus.

In the vanguard of the returning clients was an extremely pleasant and cultured Greek restaurateur known to us as ‘Vera’. Vera was in ‘her’ late forties, with receding hair and fairly nondescript features. In his other life, he was Victor, a married man with two absorbing passions, one being a motorbike and sidecar and the other the woman he could only be within the confines of our flat. I liked him right from the beginning, and as time went by began to look forward to his visits and was always pleased to see him appear at our doorway.

He viewed being Vera with a sprinkling of self-deprecating humour, and this eased my rite of passage into the world of ‘drag bags’, falsies and square-jawed femininity. My initial impression was of a children’s picture book in which the pages had been cut into sections, enabling one to put all sorts of unlikely heads on to equally unlikely bodies. However, it wasn’t long before Vera looked no more remarkable to me than anyone else.

She knew far more about make-up than I did and must have studied the women’s magazines minutely for all the little tricks. For instance, she had a whole battery of eye shadows and knew just where to put them to make her eyes seem larger and wider apart. She also knew how to apply rouge to make her face look thinner and could tell me all about moisturisers. She would apply her eyelashes with two deft flips before donning the
pièce de résistance
– the wig. After a little backcombing, the gorgeous six-foot Vera was ready.

‘Lovely,’ I’d say, as she stood and smoothed down her skirt.

Vera would then tie a little frilly white apron round her waist and begin her chores. This was no leisured drag queen, nor was she an S&M slave; Vera delighted in the daily round of ordinary household jobs. Out would come her rubber gloves, and she would fill a bucket with hot soapy water and start scrubbing the floors and staircase. Looking back, I think she would probably have enjoyed playing hostess at a select tea party. In those days of firmly divided gender roles in the home, I often thought how much housework Victor could have saved his wife if only he’d been able to introduce her to Vera.

One evening, just as Vera had almost scrubbed her way down as far as our landing and I was hanging over the banister rail talking to her, Mae emerged, leaving her client behind.

‘That twit in there’ – a jerk of her thumb indicated the twit in question – ‘only had ten bob, so I told him he could toss himself off in the corner. He should be out any minute.’

Here she raised her voice and shouted back towards the room, ‘Hurry up about it – I haven’t got all night, you know.’

She looked sharply at Vera, whose face was red with suppressed laughter.

Trying hard not to laugh herself, she said, ‘And you can stop grinning and listening to everything I say, you silly cow. I want them stairs clean enough to eat off when I come back.’

Then, delivering a smart and none too gentle kick to Vera’s behind, she clattered off down the stairs, leaving us spluttering. Just then the do-it-yourself client came scurrying out of the bedroom with a face the colour of lipstick and sped past us down the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him. He never became a regular.